Analysis of Land Use Change in the N'ZI Watershed of Côte d'Ivoire Using Landsat Satellite Images

Abstract

The forest resource of Côte d'Ivoire was estimated at 16 million hectares in 1900, the country's forest cover was only 7,850,864 ha in 1986 and 3,401,146 ha in 2015(BNETD & Tera, 2016. The country lost a total of 78% of its crop cover. Due to the expansion of agriculture which occupies about 62% of the Ivorian territory (BNETD & Tera, 2016), forest space has fallen to over 2 million hectares today (Assoma et al., 2021;Koné et al., 2021).Clear forests and forested savannahs experienced a decline of more than 14.95%, a decrease of 1.93% in dense forests and shrubby and/or grassy savannas of less than 15.15% were estimated using Landsat satellite images between 2000 and 1990 on the N'ZI catchment area using the Isodata classification method (A. M. Kouassi, 2010). Forests are composed of secondary degraded forests around the river N'ZI in particular (17% degraded forest, 10% clear forest and 3% gallery forest) (Noho et al., 2018). The N'ZI river basin constitutes a feeding zone between the savannah and forest zones. This basin was the cocoa and coffee loop from 1960 to 1980 (Yao et al., 2022). The demographic explosion of the study area from 900,000 to 3,030,381 inhabitants (INS, 2014), constituted an anthropogenic and land cause created a great pressure on resources, including land degradation resulting in the abandonment of land to other sources of income.In the search for information leading to the abandonment of land to other more productive regions, remote sensing and geographical information systems (GIS) have been chosen to monitor the evolution of land use of N'ZI watershed to inform public opinion. Updating land use and monitoring the evolution of vegetation cover are of great importance for economic development in our regions. As a result, remote sensing and satellite imagery are seen as essential for monitoring and managing landscapes (H. Chen et al., 2021). Land cover mapping and analysis of spatio-temporal changes and disaster detection through the use of remote sensing and satellite imagery has been a great success worldwide (